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On May 6, 2004, the state Tennessee House of Representatives approved by a vote of 85-5 Amendment 1, a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. On May 19, the Tennessee State Senate approved it by a vote of 28-1. The next year, on February 28, 2005, the Senate approved it by a vote of 29-3. On March 17, the House approved it by a vote of 88-7.[2] On November 7, 2006, Tennessee voters approved the amendment by a vote of 81.3% to 18.7%.[3]

On March 25, 2013, the Tennessee Senate voted 32-0 in favor of a non-binding resolution making August 31 Traditional Marriage Day in Tennessee. On April 18, the Tennessee House of Representatives voted 89-0 in favor of the resolution. Governor Bill Haslam signed the resolution into law on May 2.

On October 21, 2013, the National Center for Lesbian Rights filed a lawsuit in U.S. district court on behalf of several same-sex couples in Tennessee. The case, Tanco v. Haslam, seeks to require the state to recognize their marriages established in California and New York. On March 14, 2014, U.S. District Judge Aleta Trauger granted a preliminary injunction requiring the state to recognize the marriages of the plaintiff couples.[4] The state defendants appealed Tanco to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, which granted a stay. A three-judge panel heard oral arguments in the case on August 6, 2014, along with same-sex marriage cases originating from Michigan, Ohio, and Kentucky.[5]

On August 5, 2014, Tennessee Circuit Court Judge Russell E. Simmons, Jr. ruled in a divorce case brought by Frederick Michael Borman against Larry Kevin Pyles-Borman, who had married in Iowa in 2010. He found that the U.S. Supreme Court's dismissal of Baker v. Nelson controlled his decision, but analyzed the parties arguments nevertheless. Since the case only concerned Tennessee's failure to recognize a same-sex marriage from another jurisdiction and not the state's denial of marriage rights to same-sex couples, he noted that the state placed a number of limitations on the marriages it would recognize and that it had not singled out same-sex marriages. He agreed that marriage is a fundamental right but that the case turned on "what unions are included in the definition of marriage". He wrote that Tennessee had the responsibility for that definition, voters had enacted the definition at issue, and that "marriage can simply not be divorced from its traditional procreative purpose". He also ruled that Tennessee was not required to recognize an act of Iowa that contradicted Tennessee's own public policy. He denied the plaintiffs' request for a divorce.[6] He was the first judge to uphold the constitutionality of a state's ban on marriage for same-sex couples in the more than thirteen months since the ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court in United States v. Windsor.[7]